The study of religious or heroic legends and tales. One constant rule of mythology is that whatever happens amongst the gods or other mythical beings was in one sense or another a reflection of events on earth. Recorded myths and legends, perhaps preserved in literature or folklore, have an immediate interest to archaeology in trying to unravel the nature and meaning of ancient events and traditions.

"Man is a marvellous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is sort of a low-grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm."

The above site tends to be new age and astrological in scope but the sections on the myths is farily comprehensive, so I have posted it.

Forum Monk -

It seems to me that you don't have any physical, demonstrable proof,

Per the rules of The Club.

Yes?

john

"Man is a marvellous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is sort of a low-grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm."

Seriously, I would recommend keeping it a bit more scholarly than that. Anyone can put anything they like on Morgana. Same as Crystal Links. It's just down to the particular writer's interpretation, which can vary widely.

I agree Ishtar, my source was not the best. I only reference the compilation of myths which is one of the more complete sets in one convenient location and the purpose being to illustrate the commonality between the beliefs.

I don't advocate any points of view on that web site. I will look deeper for a more scholarly source (one .edu site I looked at last night actually referenced the same links as I did - imagine that!).

john wrote:It seems to me that you don't have any physical, demonstrable proof,

Per the rules of The Club.

No, I don't. We are back to a time when proof is nearly impossible to find. There were no books, parchments or lambskin scrolls. There was no alphabet. We don't even know with certainty where these traditions began or when the events described took place.

The best we can hope to do is look at what little is preserved; tales, petroglyphs, and perhaps cave paintings (not sure about these) and try to interpret the evidence we have. This is what the authors of Hamlett's Mill tried to do, its what Graham Hancock tried do and numerous others.

In some respects I have the benefit of looking at their work and the criticisms against it, and then cherry-picking the bits that stand up, run it through my own filters and see what is left.

I guess, despite being accused on this site recently of being New Age, I'm not at all. I tend to avoid most New Age theories and turn down invitations to New Age gatherings (of which I get quite a few, as some of my shamanic healing clients assume I must be into all that sort of thing).

The reason I avoid these people is because I don't find them particularly rigorous in what they will accept and what they won't accept. Many of them are not particularly intelligent or even consider it important to be so. I often find them to be walking examples of the saying: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions. " Much of what they believe is vague and airy fairy and changes with the weather, while my own path has been narrow, the knowledge acquired along it quite hard won and my teachers have been strict. And because I've studied the original teachings, I know where most New Age theories are coming from and what the New Agers have bastardised or corrupted or taken out of the context, thus rendering it practically useless. That's why most New Age healing doesn't work - they are not doing it right, or they're doing their own version of it which amounts to the same thing.

My aim has always been to get back as far as I can into the past, to understand how they did things in ancient times, and how they thought. I'm not interested in anything less than 2,000 years old. My avatar is one of the oldest known goddesses. So I'm not New Age. I'm positively Old Age.

Yes, oral traditions can exist for thousands of years but can we be certain that the "last version" of the story is identical to the original? Bart Ehrman has convincingly demonstrated that even with written documents there can be errors which creep into the text over time and that doesn't even begin to address the question of deliberate changes, just errors.

It's really unthinkable that an oral tradition could remain unchanged. The only people who tell us that they are unchanged are the people who claim not to have changed them!

Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.

All the more surprising then when they all seem to be telling the same story.

The important landmarks in the plots are all there in all them -
with local variations, of course, backdrops and idiosyncracies so that you can tell which area they are from, and different names because they're all from different languages.

It's a bit like cheese. You get gruyere from Switzerland, or mozzarella and parmesan from Italy, or cheddar and wensleydale from Britain ... and even within a particular type of cheese, you get different subtleties of taste according to the region its from.

So that's it really - myths are all similar in that all cheese are similar in that, despite variations of taste, they are all cheese.

Yeah....but each cheesemaker (Blessed are the Cheesemakers, you know!) thinks that his brand of cheese is the only real one and all the others are heresies!

Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.